On a Saturday morning in mid-September 2015,
Elizabeth Cabraser was making her yearly pilgrimage to the
Monterey Jazz Festival. Cabraser, who considered going into
music as a career and still drums with bands on the weekend,
was thrown off rhythm by a radio news flash: The Environmental
Protection Agency had accused Volkswagen of programming
480,000 diesel-powered cars so that they seemed to perform
better on emissions tests than they actually did.

A partner at Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, Cabraser
had developed a worldwide reputation for handling complex
cases with huge stakes: from Takata air bags, big tobacco
and the Exxon Valdez disaster to breast implants, fen-phen
diet drug and Holocaust litigation. She called her office
and told them to prepare for “a few” calls, which she would
deal with on Monday. “I didn’t get to wait ‘til Monday,” she
says. “Northern California is the epicenter of the green-car
movement, and people were angry.”